The performances strive for an authentic forlornness, but Winterbottom might have fared better with unknowns, a la Ken Loach.In Suite 16 (18), Pete Postlethwaite plays a paraplegic, who lives out his erotic fantasies through a stud, whom he puts up in his hotel suite and watches having sex on closed-circuit television. In Butterfly Kiss (18), Amanda Plummer plays a murderous down- and-out who seduces Saskia Reeves’s dippy petrol-station check-out girl. Michael Winterbottom shoots the film in a grey palette of hard- shoulder bleakness. The feeling is mutual: she rubs her chin on his salty moustache, and plays an enchanting game involving long holdings of the breath and an odd whistling sound (“I’m little, so I get two goes”).

Like all the greatest love affairs, theirs is doomed.Burnt by the Sun is so exuberantly detailed and densely textured that it repays viewing more than once It’s a real film in a season of blockbuster impostors. Bask in its radiant humour and allow yourself to be scorched by its searing power.Rounding off the week, a couple of disappointing British psycho-sexual dramas. She has an instinctive grace and intelligence, a face full of innocent coquetry, and appraising dark eyes, which twinkle with merriment and humanity The camera is in love with her – and so is her father. To him life is a test of endurance and one-upmanship – in no sense a moral pursuit.Burnt by the Sun has a superb ensemble cast But one performance shines brighter than all the others. Nadia Mikhalkov, the director’s eight-year- old daughter, plays his daughter in the film, skipping, dancing, making a mouth like a platypus, and protesting at being saddled with childish things.

Menchikov gives a performance as sleek as his black hair: the consummate spy, insidiously charming and blithely conscienceless. We see him tricking Maroussia, by hiding underwater after diving into a lake. The original hollow man, he is a Party hack hiding behind party games. “You are like Switzerland,” an old woman upbraids her spouse, “well-fed and apathetic.”Things are stirred up by the arrival of the young survivor of the Russian roulette (Oleg Menchikov), who returns to the house where he was once the lover of the colonel’s beautiful, younger wife, Maroussia (Ingeborga Dapkounaite). He blasts through the sedate old place, with songs at the piano, games and anecdotes – a blizzard of energy. And yet he casts a chill too, turning out to be a Stalinist spy, on a mission to turn in the colonel. It is the middle of a long, hot summer, and the balmy days are filled by the colonel’s antique relations with quotations from Pushkin, reminiscence and squabbling.